Councilwoman Touts LAX Plan as Neighbor-Friendly

City Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski, who today will formally introduce what she calls her “consensus plan” to modernize Los Angeles International Airport, says the proposal would better protect airport communities by requiring more study and oversight of the most controversial projects.

But whether Miscikowski can sell her proposal to critics who have attacked Mayor James K. Hahn’s $9-billion plan may depend on whether she can convince them that her approach can be trusted.

The councilwoman has suggested that officials approve Hahn’s makeover and then use what’s known as a “specific plan” to move the more controversial elements to a second phase that would require more scrutiny from residents and city officials.

Specific plans provide a detailed blueprint for development and are frequently used by California cities to regulate growth. But their effectiveness varies widely and the communities near the airport may be reluctant to back a plan that relies on that strategy.

“Because each plan is drafted differently, by different people, some are ironclad, some are namby-pamby,” said Lisa Gritzner, Miscikowski’s chief of staff. “If they’re not written properly, they can be useless and open to interpretation.”

Miscikowski will ask airport and planning commissioners to consider her proposal during today’s hearing. The commissioners are scheduled to vote on the issue June 14 and it will go to the full council later this summer.

Hahn has said his staff was in touch with Miscikowski’s staff about “how to use the specific plan as a detailed planning document” and that he was looking forward to working with the councilwoman.

Miscikowski, who represents communities around LAX, began drafting her proposal earlier this year when mounting criticism of Hahn’s plan led some city leaders to conclude that it would not pass the council. City officials have already spent nine years and $126 million trying to devise a way to modernize the world’s fifth-busiest airport. LAX received its last face-lift in preparation for the 1984 Summer Olympics.

Hahn’s plan would dramatically change the way passengers use the airport by sending private vehicles to a check-in center near the San Diego Freeway, demolishing Terminals 1, 2 and 3 on the airport’s north side and tearing down parking garages in the central terminal area, which would be replaced with a new terminal complex.

By contrast, Miscikowski wants to split construction into two phases.

She would build the projects that some airlines, business groups and residents agree on, including a consolidated rental-car facility, a transit hub and an elevated tram.

But she would postpone the most disliked elements of Hahn’s plan -- such as the remote check-in facility and demolition of the terminals on the airport’s north side -- until after an extensive public review.

Planning experts complimented Miscikowski’s proposal, saying it would give the City Council more say in redeveloping the aging airport. “This is the best idea I can think of to achieve her objectives,” said William Fulton, a senior scholar at the School of Policy, Planning and Development at USC.

Even so, Miscikowski is still far from achieving a consensus. Residents and influential lawmakers worry that the specific plan process isn’t airtight.

Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), who represents communities around LAX, noted that specific plans are often modified later. “Those documents are too easily amended,” Harman wrote recently in an e-mail to 400 constituents, “to provide the ironclad commitments we need for security and capacity constraints.”

Bill West, general manager of H.B. Drollinger Co., which owns more than half of Westchester’s central business district, was more blunt. “It’s a leap of faith,” he said.

But Miscikowski has taken to the road with her 36-page proposal to defend the idea of using a specific plan. “It is a city law,” she said. “It can’t be changed easily by one person. It has to go through a deliberative process.”

To build any of the projects in the second phase, she explained, the specific plan would require the city’s airport agency to hire a consultant to study the project and then submit the study to “stakeholder” groups and various city agencies for approval.

Historically, Los Angeles’ disparate communities have turned to specific plans to preserve their unique character and regulate development. Officials use specific plans as a negotiating tool with developers to ensure that roads, sewers and other infrastructure keep pace with growth.

But residents in communities spanning the San Fernando Valley, the Westside, coastal areas and the Eastside give them mixed reviews.

In Eagle Rock, residents are upset that city officials issued Walgreens a permit to build a glass structure they call a “carport” that fronts on a street, even though the specific plan requires “buildings” to face the street to increase pedestrian traffic.

In the San Fernando Valley, Tony Lucente, president of the Studio City Residents Assn., gives the specific plan for Ventura Boulevard a B-plus for regulating height and density along a 17-mile stretch, but added that it failed to achieve one major goal.

“The fees that were assessed for development were intended really to fund traffic mitigations,” Lucente said, “and, frankly, many of them have been invisible to the community.”

Other communities that have tried to regulate growth through specific plans have encountered another problem: enforcement.Sandy Brown, a 33-year resident of Westwood Village who helped draft the neighborhood’s specific plan, said the city Planning Commission failed to enforce it when it approved a $100-million mixed-use project in the area earlier this year.

The commission adopted 18 amendments to the specific plan to accommodate the project’s size and scope, though city planners said many were minor.

“Specific plans have no teeth,” Brown said.

Miscikowski’s proposal has an advantage when it comes to enforcement, planners said, because it would rely in part on what she terms an “oversight committee” to study projects before city agencies review them.

It is also strengthened by traffic limits that it imposes for streets surrounding the airport, city officials say. The proposal requires the airport agency’s director to verify that projects listed in Phase 2 of the councilwoman’s plan would not exceed those traffic limits.

Gritzner, Miscikowski’s chief of staff, suggested that residents and lawmakers, in deciding whether to support the plan, look to the specific plan that regulates traffic in Los Angeles’ coastal areas. That plan requires developers who build in beach communities to conduct rigorous traffic studies and pay a fee for each car trip that their project is expected to generate.

The coastal specific plan has helped regulate growth in the beach area, said Jay Kim, a senior transportation engineer for Los Angeles, and the fees are helping the city chip away at much-needed fixes to the area’s transportation system.